Share your coping strategies for horrid news

I wanted to make a thread to ask my fellow OTCers: how do you handle reading awful stuff in the news? My own approach is as follows.

1. If I'm reading it, is available for people to notice.
2. If it's awful, it's either a one-off tragedy or a systemic problem.
3. If it's a one-off tragedy, they sadly happen, and there's no point dwelling on them. If it's a systemic problem, then it has happened before.
4. If it's happened before, and it's shocking now, then you can conclude it happened many times before and I never heard about it. Possibly, almost everybody heard nothing about it.
5. If people didn't hear about it before, but are hearing about it now, then exposure is increasing and that's a good thing.

This line of reasoning has helped me keep my blood pressure low when I read up on shit like this. How do you guys handle it?

Sometimes, I can't handle it. I then get withdrawn, moody, sullen and cynical. Other times, I have to merely vent, or find something innocent and cute to smile at (small kids are good for that sort of thing). Usually, a resolve to be better, that I won't be part of the problem, that I'd strive to be the chain-breaker, as it were.

And sometimes, to prepare myself for when it's my turn.

Alcohol.

I also try to find news stories that reaffirm my faith in humanity.

I te3nd to find a funny story or comic strip to make me laugh.

Or I go into a semi-depressive mood for a few days and just slowly come back.

I remember what Vonnegut said about spending more time in gloom than any sane person would.

There is no shame in detaching yourself and appreciating that you live in a cushy paradise where no one wants to murder you.

Except the police.

Just to get this out of the way now, this discussion thread is not about the stories I linked, those are just particularly horrid examples. If someone thinks they can successfully execute an "Endemic Racism: Solutions" thread without it devolving into ranting, more power to ya.

Ignore the news, continue to strive to achieve whatever you're working towards.

Think about the issues for a while to find out if there's anything to learn, go over the emotions a bit, letting the emotions run wild for a while (of course containing it to the extent that nothing stupid happens, like objects being broken or stuff like that,) feeling down, and then there's this nice path through sadness to happiness: nostalgia.

When I'm feeling sad, I sometimes go to something that gives me a great sense of nostalgia - like reminiscing about a past relationship or something I used to do with my best friend when we were kids, or simply reading or watching something that really gets the nostalgia machine churning. This then leads to more nostalgia being sought, and eventually I find myself watching or reading or thinking about something really nice that I can have, or simply something that makes me happy.

Like, let's imagine that I had managed to turn my general feeling of misery into nostalgia, I might watch something that's really nostalgic. If it's something with nostalgia built right in (as an intended part of it) like the anime Kanon from 2006, I might watch an episode or two and be done with nostalgia 'cause something there will have reminded me of something else - maybe the voice of the male lead has led me to watching Haruhi instead, and there, I'm happy and laughing.

Basically:

Misery->immersion->contemplation->start looking for something that fits the mood->find something nostalgic that causes a greater need for nostalgia->eventually get distracted and be happy.

Works for me every time.

edited 30th Mar '12 8:25:11 PM by BestOf

I seem to cope with it by detaching myself from the reality of what it is. The news, no matter what it is, often sounds so amazingly fake to me. So far away and something that can't be happening. Sometimes I don't manage that and I become distressed. Crying and such.

To deal with that I bitch about it for a while and then go do something else that is entirely unrelated. I can't look it over at all until I've calmed down. I'll just go meditate on my cleaning shelves or something. Then, after a while, I can think on it again. When my emotions have been squelched.

First I'm like Oh jezzus fucking christ...

And then that kinda goes away in a few minutes. My brain doesn't really stick with big emotions.

I wish I could say that I was shocked or outraged by the events in the world, but I'm pretty numb to all of it. Between all my education, training, and personal life experiences, nothing really touches me unless I choose for it to.

I often use humor and more specifically dark/gallows humor. Often times gets people mad at me, because they perceive me as making light of a situation or making jokes at the expense of tragedy, when in all honesty that's not my intent.

Well, sometimes drinking makes for a good coping mechanism, but I find humor is a more healthy one, and one less likely to cause people to set up chairs in one's living room.

Not that I'm trying to totally discredit your choice of articles, but I try to remain skeptical when looking at headlines. Almost all news is usually painted up to be much more sensational than it actually is, so my first reaction to seeing a shocking headline is to look carefully down the column for those inevitable details that make the premise of the title far less extreme than it tries to put on to its readers.

Granted, there's always that rare article where the events are just as outrageous as the title claims, but I'm mostly describing my initial reaction, and to be honest, It takes a lot for me to be truly "shocked" at the content of a news article. Maybe that means I'm a pessimist, but I hope not.

Well there are types of headline that let you know right off the bat that the text of the article will not and possibly cannot mitigate your shock - such as the headlines about the death of someone you hold in high regard.

There was no way that the news of Christopher Hitchens' passing could've arrived to me that would not have shocked me to my core.

News about natural disasters or terrorism are the same way: "thousands dead" will not be mitigated by anything short of the article hinting at a possibility that those people didn't die.

True. Maybe a lot of my approach has to do with the fact that I use Yahoo! as my homepage. That site floods its news reel with so many stupid articles that I can't help but take most news headers with a grain of salt.

I read a lot of stories that make me sad, but I've taught myself to contain my emotions. As Pickles of Metalocalypse once said, "Admitting sadness makes you gay."

Panic.

... I don't see any problem with the second and third articles.

Honestly I just stop reading the news after the war in iraq started and now just rely on second hand accounts regarding what's happening in the world. It just got too depressing.

edited 12th Apr '12 6:29:43 AM by joeyjojo

My first instinct is to back off and forget about it, but lately I like to indulge the bad news a bit. Read it over, swirl it around in my mouth. In the end it usually generates a feeling of, "well, this may suck for them, and I do feel sorry for the victims, but this is not my life and it is not a problem I want to devote myself to", and I file it away in the very disorganized "examples" bin in my mind for office chatter.

I like to keep my worries grounded.

If it's awful and doesn't effect me(such as what happened to Trayvon Martin) I analyze it, discuss it, and am otherwise not affected by it.

If it's awful and in my local area, I think about it. A lot. I think about how it will affect me.

If it's awful, global, and is going to affect me(I.E. increased likelihood that we're getting into another war) then I think about it and mix between manic moods where I look forward to it, and chain-smoking depression when I dwell on it too much and think about the reality of what that means for me.

World-ending apocalypse or war, I'm very bipolar about.

Sometimes I think what other people say here, sometimes I think journalist are horrible for digging this stuff up to sell papers.

I identify nascent coping strategies and get rid of them. Because I feel that staying comfortable while other people suffer is wrong- though that means that I'll be miserable until no-one is.

I bask in the injustice and tragedy, because it's better than complacency.

Careful that you don't let that develop into too much of a sense of superiority over those who ignore injustice and tragedy. That'd be just as much of a coping strategy, thinking that it somehow does more good to be miserable about it even while doing nothing. (I'm not accusing you of doing this, but rather bringing it up because it's something I myself have had trouble avoiding.)

I'm wary of the attitudes reflected by a phrase such as "bask in the injustice and tragedy" for that reason; it seems like another way to feel better about yourself while avoiding the cognitive dissonance of willfully ignoring something.

Correct you are. Attitudes aren't worth anything until they accomplish something, and I sure haven't changed much yet.

... You know, after posting that, I was struck by how unhealthy it sounds. I just want the world to change, and think that maintaining an eagerness to change it is more important than moment-to-moment personal happiness.